Isabella Thoburn

Isabella Thoburn (1840-1901) was the first woman sent by the New England Branch of the Women's Foreign Missionary Society. She went to India, focused on improving educational opportunities for women in Lucknow, India. In 1871, she began a girls’ school in Lucknow and then a boarding school in Lal Bagh estate. During the 1880s, she returned to the United States lecturing about her mission work and teaching in Chicago at Chicago Training School for City, Home, and Foreign Missions. Later she returned to India to do more work in the mission field. In 1903, she found Lucknow Women’s College, later renamed in her honor, Isabella Thoburn College. 

Dr. Robert writes of the debate to send Miss Thoburn due to lack of funds, when a woman rose to say: “Shall we lose Miss Thoburn because we have not the needed money in our hands to send her? No, let us rather walk the streets of Boston in our calico dresses, and save the expense of more costly apparel. I move, then, the appointment of Miss Thoburn as our missionary to India.” Dr. Dana Robert elaborates further that one of Isabella Thoburn's breakthroughs was "carving out an independent role for unmarried women." Invited by her brother James to help lead a school in India, she was sent by the Woman's Foreign Missionary Society with Clara Swain in late 1869. There, she helped found the first Christian women's college in Asia, named Lucknow Woman’s College. Upon her return to the United States in poor health, she visited the Mildmay Deaconness Hospital in England, and was inspired to start a deaconness movement in India, and also laid down plans for what would become the New England Deaconness Training School. A longer biography of Isabella Thoburn can be found on the STH History of Missiology site.

Isabella Thoburn providing many articles for Heathen Woman's Friend; this is a handwritten map she provided in one of her articles.